The Interaction Engine

Communicative interaction forms the core of human experience. In this fascinating book Levinson, one of the world's leading scholars in the field, explores how human communicative interaction is structured, the demands it puts on our cognitive processing, and how its system evolved out of continuities with other primate systems. It celebrates the role of the 'interaction engine' which drives our social interaction, not only in human life, but also in the evolution of our species – showing how exchanges such as words, glances, laughter and face-to-face encounters bring us our greatest and most difficult experiences, and have come to define what it means to be human. It draws extensively on the author's fieldwork with speakers across multiple cultures and communities, and was inspired by his own experiences during the Covid lockdown, when humans were starved of the very social interaction that shapes our lives. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

• Explains how language evolved and points to possible precursors
• Explores how we can communicate even when we have no shared language, showing how language is built on an underlying interactive facility
• Dissects the major properties of the interaction engine and, the high demands of the cognitive processing involved
• This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core